Compliance Toolkit

Kazaa's man in Washington speaks out

Tags:
Sharman,
MPAA,
RIAA,
Philip Corwin

Declan McCullagh CNET News

Published: 06 Dec 2004 11:25 GMT

Philip Corwin has one of the least enviable jobs in Washington DC: He defends file-swapping networks.

That's not a trivial task for Corwin, the lobbyist for Kazaa's parent company Sharman Networks. When making the rounds on Capitol Hill, Corwin, 54, is up against the dual political powerhouses of the Recording Industry Association of America and the Motion Picture Association of America.

Australia-based Sharman Networks hired Corwin almost three years ago to be its lone representative in Washington DC Since then, Sharman has been fending off lawsuits and a slew of legislative proposals designed either to shutter the service or scare users away from it.

Being an underdog is a switch for Corwin, who spent much of his career lobbying for the influential American Bankers Association, the Commercial Finance Association and the Independent Bankers Association of America, after a stint as a US Senate staffer. Now he's a partner at the Butera & Andrews lobbying firm.

Kazaa is one of the largest and most successful peer-to-peer file sharing networks, boasting just under 2.5 million users per day, just under that of rival eDonkey, according to some industry watchers.

ZDNet UK sister site CNET News.com spoke with Corwin about piracy, pornography and his experiences as a lobbyist.

Q: What's it like lobbying against the RIAA and the movie studios?
A: Personally I get along fine with them. But they play real hardball when they lobby, and we play just as hard when we're lobbying back.

RIAA President Cary Sherman told Congress last year that paedophiles were using Kazaa to seduce children. Is that what you mean by hardball?
They spend an awful lot of time dwelling on the allegations that minors are being exposed to pornography when they use peer-to-peer. I think this whole content path is a very dangerous one for them to go down.

This is an industry that's actively promoting and marketing to minors songs that can only be described as aural pornography. If they want to talk about content, we'll be happy to talk about their content. Mr. Sherman's industry is actively marketing some of the most vile content imaginable.